This blog is devoted to a variety of topics including politics, current events, legal issues, and we even take the time to have some occasional fun. After all, blogging is about having a little fun, right?

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

If you can't trust family ...

Barry has touted that America is just biting at the bit to have his health care/health insurance reform passed. He keeps claiming that if you like your doctor or coverage you can keep it. He states there will be no rationing of care. He proclaims that this plan will be deficit-neutral. Pardon me a second while I laugh my @$$ off because I was unaware that the shovel-ready jobs he spoke of last year involved shoveling bullsh*t. Late last night, JammieWearingFool found a neat little tidbit in this debate. It turns out that Milton Wolf, Barry's second cousin, is a doctor, and he is lock-step opposed to this fiasco:I may not be the first physician to oppose ObamaCare, but I am the first physician from Barack Obama's own family to oppose ObamaCare. Here is yet another reason why... ObamaCare contains an insidious provision to financially penalize your doctor if he or she consults a specialist for your medical care.Scott Gottlieb of the Wall Street Journal explains:Primary-care doctors who refer patients to specialists will face financial penalties under the plan. Doctors will see 5% of their Medicare pay cut when their "aggregated" use of resources is "at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization," according to the chairman's mark of Section 3003 of the bill. Doctors will feel financial pressure to limit referrals to costly specialists like surgeons, since these penalties will put the referring physician on the hook for the cost of the referral and perhaps any resulting procedures.

There will be an immediate and obvious consequence.

Sick patients will be denied the care of specialists. It's clear that financially penalizing primary care physicians is an obvious attempt to dissuade them from referring you or your family to the specialist they otherwise conclude you need. Consider the insidious nature of this arbitrary 90th percentile rule: every year, 10% of primary care physicians will be penalized no matter how prudent their referrals were and now matter how many fewer referrals there are this year compared to last. It's irrelevant to the government how badly you need the care of a specialist; only how many of your fellow patients your doctor determined were in need of specialty care. And each subsequent year will be worse than the prior as 100% of primary care physicians will try to avoid being penalized, unmistakably setting the standard of medical care ever lower.There is another delayed and less obvious consequence.

The sickest patients will be denied the care of all physicians. The most effective method for a primary care physician to stay below the 90th percentile in referrals to specialists would be to simply not accept patients into their practice who are likely to need the care of specialists, if they choose to accept Medicare at all. Thus begins the uncoupling of health care insurance -- in this case, Medicare -- from actual health care. What good is your mother's Medicare card if her doctor won't accept it? Already, 42% of doctors simply won't accept Medicare. ObamaCare will drive that number still higher.

The end game. Big-government statists will ultimately showcase these patients as evidence for the need of even more government intervention. They'll create legions of sick patients without appropriate medical care and then they'll create sympathy for them. Their solution? The so-called public option which will accelerate the process and then, ultimately, a single-payer complete government takeover. They'll claim -- as they always do when unintended consequences inevitably arise -- that these tragedies are the result of capitalism rather than the result of their own government intervention.

Always the solution is more government.These effects are both easily predictable and unquestionably unconscionable. ObamaCare will expressly penalize your doctor for providing you with medical care.

This is Barry's own flesh and blood calling BS to his assertions that his health care/health insurance reform will reduce costs, and provide care to the approximately 47 million people who lack coverage now. It won't reduce costs at all. It'll increase costs to the taxpayer who will be forced to pay for those that either can't afford health insurance or those that don't want the insurance for a variety of reasons. Worse, as Mr. Wolf points out, care will be rationed. Whether those in Congress or the president himself states contrary to this fact, the fact remains that a government bureaucrat will be the ultimate decider as to what sort of care you will receive, and whether or not you're even worth the care. It was Barry himself who told a constituent at an ABC-sponsored Q & A session that instead of her grandmother getting the pacemaker she needed that it might've been better if she were just given painkillers.That is exactly the sort of rationing the president is emphasizing. He's lying about what the health care/health insurance reform will do. He tells voters that if you like your doctor and your health coverage you can keep it, but the bill before Congress now would work to remove that promise. Mr. Wolf sees what's coming, and he's not the only one. Docs4PatientCare was organized by a number of physicians that are concerned about this bill heading through the Congress. From their mission statement:We are an organization of concerned physicians committed to the establishment of a health care system that preserves the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship, promotes quality of care, supports affordable access to all Americans, and protects patients' freedom of choice.

We urge patients and physicians to get involved in order to preserve the good qualities of our healthcare system, address the problems, while preventing its bureaucratic destruction. These aren't a bunch of think-tank gurus or policy wonks. These are doctors that are concerned about the congressional plan to "reform" our health care system. Democrats have been pushing this idea for over forty years, and now with overwhelming majorities in both the House and the Senate, and commanding the White House, they feel that now is the best time to ram this down our throats. Call this plan what you want -- socialized medicine, government-run health care, what have you -- but it falls to the fact that they want control of yet another industry; absolute control. In his address to Congress on 12 April 1974 Gerald Ford stated "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." In the case of Obamacare that is exactly what we will get if this legislative monstrosity is passed. Barry should be listening to his second cousin instead of adhering to his Alinsky-esque education.Publius II